Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the Week of July 11, 2022


The Body

(Identity: Levels of Emptiness: 1)

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Obviously, we are utterly dependent on our body. We take good care of it. We revel in the natural joy of being in our body, especially when it is healthy. We may be proud of our body, or ashamed of parts of it. We may cultivate a more perfect body. We bathe it, clothe it, and adorn it. We feed it and pander to its tastes.

Is the body doing all this itself? Is it feeding and clothing itself? Or are we feeding and clothing our body? If it is the latter, then we and our body are not identical. Yet, when the body is sick or tired, we think and say I am sick or I am tired, implying that we are our body. There is something unexamined here, some confusion overlooked, a relationship not considered. Am I my body? Or am I not my body? Or both?

Who owns this body? I own it. It does not own itself. Does that mean that I and my body are not the same? What about my body image? Is how my body looks how I look? When I look, I look from my body, not at my body. Is it my body that looks? If so, then I am my body; I belong to it.

These are ancient and ongoing questions, elaborated for millennia in debates among proponents of physicalist, idealist, and dualist viewpoints. Yet to pursue a vibrant spiritual inner life, to take up the practice of the spiritual path, we are not required to know the answers, nor even to have or not have a particular view of whether or not there is a soul. We do not need to be philosophers or have a philosophy of life in order to work on ourselves. We just work. Those who engage in spiritual practices are driven by a deep intuition, not necessarily conscious, that it is the right and necessary thing to do. Over time, the effects of inner work validate its rightness. Even if it turns out that there is no soul, even if we die along with our body, by having engaged in spiritual practices we will have made our own lives and the lives of those around us better. Yet as our inner work progresses, our views on the question of the existence of the soul are sure to evolve.

The experience of living appears to point strongly toward the view that I am not my body. I decide what to do and my body does it. Some argue that this is an illusion, but if so, it is certainly a convincing illusion. So in practice, in how we live our life, we live as if we are not our body. Yes, our body matters to us, crucially. Yet it does not appear to be us. It is a remarkable and unfathomably complex product of eons of evolution and we can strive to be worthy of having such a vehicle for this life, to justify being entrusted with this body, with this life.

The first identity we have is of being this body. But as our mind and emotions develop, we grow out of that view. My body is just my body, it is not I. The health and satisfaction of my body, though of inestimable value, will not in themselves grant fulfillment in my life. The body belongs to time. It does not taste the higher, though it can serve as a springboard toward the higher. Thus, the body itself is empty, empty of I, empty of timeless value.

Yet a remarkable depth, spiritual depth can be found within our body. The body is empty, and in the same way that a church, mosque, or temple can be a venue for the sacred while itself being just a building, the body, in its emptiness, in its readiness to be put to whatever use we choose, can be the instrument of the spirit. Our work with sensation, with being in our body, in the sensitive energy in the body, takes us a major step closer to the within, to the shoreline between the body and the spirit. All spirituality runs through the present moment and our body is always in the present, so that whenever we are in our body, rather than lost in thoughts, memories, plans, daydreams, or reactive emotions, we are also in the present. Though as our inner work progresses, it becomes ever clearer that our physical body itself cannot reach the heights of the spirit. For that, we develop ourselves, we develop what we may call our soul.

My body is not I. But it is my temporary home, my workshop for creating and fulfilling the destiny I choose. A moment will come when this body will die. That moment will be a now. What is the best use I can make of this body while I still have it?


     

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